I keep telling my friends that canning doesn’t really take that much time. Well, sometimes, it totally does. It takes all day and you end up sticky and with a sink full of dishes. BUT you can avoid that very easily by being smart about the recipes you make and how you make them. I made a canner full of applesauce yesterday, but I also managed to sleep in, do laundry, bake bread, finish . . . → Read More: How to Make Applesauce and Spend the Day Biking

Well, we’ve finally done it. We’ve been making our own yogurt for almost three years now. You need to let it sit out for eight hours to culture at room temperature. However, during the colder months the ambient air is a bit chilly, so we wrap it in a kitchen towel and put in in the (cold) oven. The yogurt itself is still 120 degrees when it goes in, and it will retain this . . . → Read More: Yogurt Fail!

Our Dark Days meal for the week was something that we have already posted, so we decided to post a strategy instead. Eating locally sometimes means having limited options and learning how to deal with what you can get. In our case, we can’t find (or afford when we find it!) user-friendly, pre-wrapped packages of local chicken breasts. So, we buy a whole chicken and do some work ourselves.

I had been scrutinizing labels for the last year or so, trying to find products without petrochemicals, chemicals that mess with hormones, or shady business practices. I could find one of the three, maybe two, but not all three. And they were EXPENSIVE! And tiny, so the bathroom trash was filling up with little empty bottles.

I have to admit that I was skeptical of this project. I made Erik try it, because I thought it would be an interesting experiment, but I wasn’t terribly hopeful that this would come close to the commercial dyes. But look! The colors are so vivid! It’s really not much harder than using Paas and the ingredients are pretty common, so you could do this on a whim…like the day before Easter when you . . . → Read More: Take a Pause from Paas and Make Your Own Natural Easter Egg Dye